The Presslys and the The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP)

by James W. Gettys

The Associate Reformed Presbyterian (ARP) Church was created in 1782 in Philadelphia when leaders of two Presbyterian denominations, the Associate Church and the Reformed Church, united. The Associate Church had its beginnings in Scotland in 1733 when Ebenezer Erskine and two other ministers carried out the Secession from the Church of Scotland (which was Presbyterian). Initially the new church was known as the Secession Church. The Associate Church was eventually became the formal name because it was a less contentious term. Members of this church moved from the lowlands of Scotland to the northern counties of Ireland and from there to North America. The Reformed Church has its roots in the Covenanter Church which has been traced back as far as Elizabethan England. The Covenanters from the lowlands and Southern Uplands of Scotland moved to northern Ireland and then to North America. By the late eighteenth century the Covenanter Church was known in America as the Reformed Presbyterian Church. A remnant of this church did not agree with the 1782 merger and exists today as the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

In 1803 the Synod of the Carolinas (renamed the Synod of the South in 1822) was founded as one Synod of the ARP Church. Over the years the other Synods united with larger Presbyterian denominations which eventually formed the Presbyterian Church, USA. Today the Synod of the South remains as the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church with its center in Greenville, South Carolina. It is the oldest Presbyterian denomination in the United States with a continuous existence.

Whole congregations of both the Associate and Reformed churches immigrated to North America settling in the English Colonies from New York to Georgia. The Pressly or Pressley families (both spellings were used in the eighteenth century) most associated with the ARP Church settled in the Ninety Six area of the colony of South Carolina in the period just before the Revolutionary War. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the Pressly/Pressley families who became members of the ARP denomination were members of the original Secession or Associate Church.

Perhaps the most outstanding product of the Pressly family was John T. Pressly who was an ARP minister in the early years of the nineteenth century. He taught a generation of future ARP ministers at Union Academy, located in what is now McCormick County, South Carolina. His students went to Ohio and Pennsylvania to earn college degrees, then returned to study theology under John T. Pressly. He was an outspoken opponent of slavery and fought legal restrictions prohibiting slaves from learning to read and write. In 1831 he left South Carolina to take a position as the professor at a new Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania founded by the ARP Synod of the West. When he was selected as the pastor of an ARP Church in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the seminary moved with its leader to that town.

Two of John T. Pressly's students, James Patterson Pressly and Ebenezer Erskine Pressly, rode their horses from Abbeville County, South Carolina to Oxford, Ohio in 1824. These two sixteen-year-old boys were graduated from Miami University, returned to South Carolina, studied theology, and became ARP ministers. Ebenezer Erskine Pressly became the founding President of Erskine College in 1839. These two cousins along with The Rev. John S. Pressly, another cousin, were three strong leaders of the ARP Church in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Centennial History of the ARP Church, published in 1904 contains biographical sketches of twenty-one Pressly ministers of the denomination in the nineteenth century. For most of its history, Erskine College had at least one Pressly on its faculty. The college has always had descendants of this family on its faculty. There are no active Pressly ministers in the ARP denomination in 1999, but there are descendants of the family who remain leaders in the denomination.